that
the points of disagreement are purely speculative and
of no moral importance, or that there is a misunderstanding
of language, and the same thing is meant
under difference of words, or else that the real truth is
something different from what is held by any of the
disputants, and that each is representing some important
element which the other ignores or forgets. In either
case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary,
if we would understand what we disagree with, or would
oppose it with success. Spinoza's influence over European
thought is too great to be denied or set aside, and
if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we
cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no
one now living will deny in words, and which a century
or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effects
upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are
able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy
in the first and only logical form which as yet it has
assumed. Whatever may have been the case with his
disciples, in the author of this system there was no
unwillingness to look closely at it, or follow it out
to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits
belong to Spinoza, at least he has done as
much as with language can be done to make himself
thoroughly understood--a merit in which it cannot be
said that his followers have imitated him--Pantheism,
as it is known in England, being a very synonym of
vagueness and mysticism.

The fact is, that both in friend and enemy alike,
there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really
was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little
disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox
Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist
--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would
have had something reasonable to say, could find no
better name for him than a Colt trunkner Mann--a
God intoxicated man; an expression which has been
quoted by everybody who has since written upon the
subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those
laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due
allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a
Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can
it be applie